The Golem (6 page)

Only a man whose roots were in the Ghetto and whose every fibre was soaked in Ghetto lore, a man who had learnt from his earliest childhood to lie in wait for his prey like a spider, could have gone on perpetrating such atrocities for years without being caught. To do that, it took a man who knew everyone in the city, who knew such intimate details of their affairs and their finances that he almost seemed to have psychic powers. And if it hadn’t been for me, he would still be up to his tricks, would have carried on until he retired to spend his declining years as a venerable patriarch, surrounded by his loved ones, a shining example to future generations until at last he, too, went the way of all flesh.

But I also grew up in the Ghetto, my blood is tainted with its fiendish cunning as well. I was the author of his downfall, striking him unawares, like a bolt from the blue. Dr. Savioli, a young German doctor, is generally given the credit for unmasking him, but he was merely the tool in my hand. I it was who piled up the evidence and supplied the proof, until the day came when the long arm of the law was reaching out for Dr. Wassory.

That was when the fiend committed suicide, the Lord be praised! It was as if my double had been beside him, guiding his hand! He took his life with the very phial of amyl nitrate that I had deliberately left in his surgery when I went there myself to trick him into falsely diagnosing glaucoma in me as well. When I left it I breathed a fervent prayer that it would be this phial of amyl nitrate that would deliver the
coup de grâce
.

Word went round the city that he had died from a stroke – the effect of amyl nitrate when it is inhaled resembles a stroke. It was not long, however, before the truth was known.”

Charousek stared into space, lost in thought, as if immersed in some deep problem; then he shrugged a shoulder in the direction of Aaron Wassertrum’s junk shop. “Now he’s alone”, he muttered, “all alone with his greed and – and – and with his wax doll.”

My heart began to thump. I stared at Charousek in horror. Was the man mad? It must be the wanderings of a fevered mind. Of course! Of course! He must have invented it all, dreamt it up. That tale about the eye-specialist can’t be true. He’s consumptive, it’s the fever of death spinning round and round in his brain. I decided to make some jocular remark to calm him down, to set his thoughts moving in a more cheerful direction, but before anything suitable occurred to me, a memory struck me like a bolt of lightning: the door to my room being torn open and the face of Aaron Wassertrum with its hare-lip and round, fish’s eyes staring in.

Savioli? Dr. Savioli?! Now wasn’t that the name that Zwakh, the old puppeteer, had whispered to me as the name of the young gentleman who had rented his studio? Dr. Savioli! It was as if someone were screaming the name inside my head. A stream of twitching, nebulous figures danced through my mind, jostling with sudden inklings that were racing towards me.

Filled with fear, I was about to question Charousek, to tell him everything I had seen and heard from the room next to mine, when he was suddenly racked with a violent fit of coughing that almost sent him tumbling to the ground. He nodded a brief farewell, and I saw him grope his way along the wall and out into the rain. His story, I now felt, was not the figment of a fevered imagination. He was right; crime did stalk these streets, day and night, like a disembodied spirit in search of a physical form through which to manifest itself. It is in the air, but we do not see it. Suddenly, it precipitates in a human soul, but we are not aware of it and by the time we sense it, it has long since dissolved back into thin air. All that we hear are dark rumours of some hideous deed.

All at once I understood the innermost nature of the mysterious creatures that live around me: they drift through life with no will of their own, animated by an invisible, magnetic current, just like the bridal bouquet floating past in the filthy water of the gutter. I felt as if the houses were staring down at me with malicious expressions full of nameless spite: the doors were black, gaping mouths in which the tongues had rotted away, throats which might at any moment give out a piercing cry, so piercing and full of hate that it would strike fear to the very roots of our soul.

What was the last thing the medical student had said about Wassertrum? I whispered his words to myself, “Aaron Wassertrum is alone now with his greed and – his wax doll.”

What in heaven’s name can he have meant by the wax doll?

I told myself to calm down, he must have meant it metaphorically. It must have been one of those deranged metaphors he uses to take you by surprise; you don’t understand them at first, only later they unexpectedly take shape and give you a profound shock, like a harsh light suddenly striking some unusual object.

I gave the people who were sheltering in the archway with me a closer scrutiny. Now the fat old man was standing beside me, the same one who had given that horrible laugh earlier. He was wearing gloves and a black frock coat, and his protuberant eyes were fixed on the entrance of the house opposite. His coarse-featured face was clean shaven and was twitching with excitement.

Automatically, I followed the direction of his gaze and realised that he was staring spellbound at Rosina, who was standing on the other side of the street, her permanent smile playing round her lips. The old man was trying to make signs to her, and I could tell that she was well aware of them, but was behaving as if she had no idea what he meant.

Finally the old man could stand it no longer, and waded across the street on tiptoe, bobbing up and down in a ridiculous manner, like a huge, black rubber ball bouncing over the puddles.

He seemed to be well-known, to go by all the innuendoes I could hear around me. Someone behind me – a lout with a red knitted scarf round his neck, a blue soldier’s cap on his head and a half-smoked cigar behind his ear – started making leering insinuations which I did not understand. All I could make out was that in the Ghetto they called the old man the ‘Freemason’ and that in their jargon this was a name for a man who has sexual relations with schoolgirls but whose connections with the police render him immune to the legal consequences.

Across the street Rosina and the old man disappeared in the darkness of the entrance hall.

We had opened the window to get rid of the tobacco smoke from my tiny room. The cold night wind blew in and set the shaggy coats hanging on the door gently swinging to and fro.

“Prokop’s noble specimen of the hatter’s art is tempted to fly away”, said Zwakh, pointing to the musician’s huge floppy hat, the broad brim of which was beginning to flap like a pair of black wings.

Joshua Prokop gave a cheery wink. “It probably wants to –”

“– go to Loisitchek’s, to listen to the dance band”, interrupted Vrieslander.

Prokop laughed and beat time to the music that was borne across the roofs on the thin winter air. Then he picked up my old, battered guitar that was leaning against the wall, pretended to pluck its broken strings and sang a strange song in a squawking falsetto, exaggerating the pronunciation of its canting jargon:

A dusty hen

With gelt to cough;

A zaftik naffka

For your kife;

Jack-a-dandy,

Snout and scoff:

Nothing but fressing –

That’s the life.

“Shows a natural aptitude for thieves’ slang, doesn’t he?” laughed Vrieslander, joining in a reprise with his rumbling bass:

Jack-a-dandy,

Snout and scoff:

Nothing but fressing –

That’s the life.

Zwakh explained. “It’s a peculiar song that Nephtali Schaffranek – the meshuggenah with the green eyeshade – croaks out every night at Loisitchek’s; there’s a dolled-up woman plays the accordion and joins in the words. It’s an interesting dive, you should come along with us some time, Pernath. Perhaps later on, when we’ve run out of punch. What do you think? As a birthday treat for you?”

“Yes, you should come along with us”, said Prokop, closing the window, “it really is worth seeing.”

Then we went back to our hot punch, each one occupied with his own thoughts. Vrieslander was carving away at a puppet.

Zwakh broke the silence. “You literally cut us off from the outside world, Joshua, when you closed that window. Since then, no one’s said a word.”

“I was just thinking about the way those coats started flapping earlier on”, Prokop answered quickly, as if to excuse his silence. “Isn’t it strange the way the wind makes inanimate objects move? Doesn’t it look odd when things which usually just lie there lifeless suddenly start fluttering. Don’t you agree? I remember once looking out onto an empty square, watching huge scraps of paper whirling angrily round and round, chasing one another as if each had sworn to kill the others; and I couldn’t feel the wind at all since I was standing in the lee of a house. A moment later they seemed to have calmed down, but then they were seized once more with an insane fury and raced all over the square in a mindless rage, crowding into a corner then scattering again as some new madness came over them, until finally they disappeared round a corner.

There was just one thick newspaper that couldn’t keep up with the rest. It lay there on the cobbles, full of spite and flapping spasmodically, as if it were out of breath and gasping for air.

As I watched, I was filled with an ominous foreboding. What if, after all, we living beings were nothing more than such scraps of paper? Could there not be a similar unseeable, unfathomable ‘wind’ blowing us from place to place and determining our actions, whilst we, in our simplicity, believe we are driven by our own free will? What if the life within us were nothing other than some mysterious whirlwind? The wind of which it says in the Bible, ‘Thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth’? Do we not sometimes dream we have plunged our hands into deep water and caught silvery fish, when all that has happened is that our hands have been in a cold draught?”

“Prokop, you’re talking like Pernath. What’s wrong with you?” asked Zwakh, giving the musician a suspicious look.

“It’s the story about the
Book of Ibbur
that we heard earlier – pity you came too late to hear it – that’s given him such strange ideas”, said Vrieslander.

“A story about a book?”

“Actually about the odd appearance of a man who brought a book. Pernath doesn’t know what he’s called, where he lives or what he wanted, and although he says his appearance was very striking, he can’t describe it.”

Immediately Zwakh pricked up his ears. “That’s remarkable”, he said after a pause. “Did this stranger happen to be smooth-faced, without any growth of beard? Did he have slanting eyes?”

“I think so”, I said. “That is, I … I’m quite certain of it. Do you know him?”

The puppeteer shook his head. “It’s just that it reminded me of the Golem.”

Vrieslander put down his knife. “Golem? I’ve heard so many people talk about that. Do you know anything about the Golem, Zwakh?”

“Who can claim to
know
anything about the Golem?” replied Zwakh with a shrug of the shoulders. “Everyone says it’s a myth until one day there’s something happens in the streets that brings it back to life. Then for a while everybody talks about it, and the rumours grow and grow until they’re so blown up, so exaggerated they become completely implausible and everyone dismisses them. The origin of the story is supposed to go back to the sixteenth century. A rabbi, following instructions in a lost book of the Cabbala, is said to have created an artificial man, the so-called Golem, as a servant to help him ring the synagogue bells and do other menial tasks.”

But it had never become a true human being, Zwakh went on. It led a kind of semi-conscious, vegetable existence, and that only by day, so it is said, through the power of a scrap of paper with a magic formula that was placed behind its teeth, attracting free stellar energy from the cosmos. And when, one evening before prayers, the rabbi forgot to take this seal out of the Golem’s mouth, it went raging through the streets in the dark, crushing everything that happened to be in its way. Finally the rabbi managed to block the creature in its path and destroy the scrap of paper. At that, the Golem sank lifeless to the ground. Nothing was left of it but the dwarf clay figure which can be seen over there in the Old-New Synagogue even today.

“That same rabbi is supposed to have been summoned to the Emperor in the castle on the Hradschin, where he called up the spirits of the dead in visible form”, added Prokop. “Modern scientists claim he must have used a magic lantern.”

“A magic lantern! People will believe anything nowadays”, Zwakh rejoindered, unperturbed. “As if Emperor Rudolf, who had devoted his whole life to such matters, would not have seen through a crude trick like that right away.

It is true that I don’t know where the legend of the Golem originated, but of this I am sure: there is something abroad in the Jewish quarter, something connected with it that never dies. My ancestors have lived here for many generations and I think I can say that there is no one who has more evidence, ancestral and personal, of the periodic appearance of the Golem than I have.”

Zwakh suddenly stopped talking and we, too, could feel how his thoughts had wandered off into the past. Seeing him sitting there at the table, his head propped in his hand, the light emphasising the strange contrast between the youthful redness of his cheeks and the whiteness of his hair, I could not help comparing his features with the mask-like faces of his puppets which he had shown me so often.

Strange how like them the old man was! The same profile, the same expression!

There are, I felt, some things on earth which cannot keep apart. As I contemplated Zwakh’s simple life, it suddenly seemed monstrous, even uncanny, that someone like him, even though he had had a better education than his forebears and been intended for the acting profession, should have suddenly returned to the shabby puppet booths and fairgrounds of his ancestors, putting the same puppets with which they had made their meagre living through the same clumsy movements and acting out the same threadbare plots. I realised that he was unable to abandon them. They were part of his life, and when he was far away from them, they changed into thoughts which lodged in his mind and made him unsettled and restless until he returned home. That is why he looked after them so lovingly and proudly dressed them up in their tawdry finery.